Scoop: To fund Covid-19 nasal vaccine booster, Yale spinout snags Series A

A biotech working to create an intranasal vaccine booster for the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has raised a Series A, the startup’s CEO confirmed to Endpoints News.

Known as Xanadu Bio, the company was spun out of Yale University. The raise will bankroll non-human primate studies for an intranasal spike mRNA vaccine booster, CEO and founder Bruce Turner told Endpoints via email.

A Dec. 27 SEC filing outlines a $30 million round for the Gladwyne, Pennsylvania biotech. Turner declined to discuss the funding or the names of the company’s investors, but said the company has “runway until late 2024.”

Akiko Iwasaki

Based on work developed in the Yale labs of Mark Saltzman and Akiko Iwasaki, Xanadu announced in February 2022 it had exclusively licensed the university’s polymeric nanoparticle delivery platform, dubbed PACE. The goal is to deliver mRNA safely through the nose.

“PACE is easily manufactured, cost effective, scalable and can be functionalized to allow both organ and cell specific delivery of its nucleic acid payload,” Xanadu says on its LinkedIn page.

The biotech was founded last year and builds upon the PACE technology that Saltzman said he has been working on for the past decade. Iwasaki, a Yale professor and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, also studies long Covid.

Iwasaki has advocated for an accelerated initiative similar to Operation Warp Speed for intranasal Covid-19 vaccines, and Anthony Fauci, the outgoing NIAID director, has also called for intranasal options. Intranasal vaccines can create what’s known as mucosal immunity, which helps the body fight off infections in the upper respiratory tract, essentially stopping a sickness before it starts and hamstringing the virus’ ability to spread to others.

Intranasal vaccine boosters have been authorized elsewhere, with China greenlighting CanSino’s and Bharat Biotech’s granted emergency use in India earlier this year. The vaccine creator, Washington University in St. Louis, licensed the technology to Ocugen this fall.

Xanadu is also looking at using the same technology to create an intranasal booster to “elicit mucosal immunity to prevent flu transmission,” Turner said. That program is “entering large animal species testing,” he added.

Turner also helped found Yale spinout Gennao Bio, which is raising a Series B for its genetic medicine pipeline. He was previously a managing director at Boxer Capital and Tavistock Group after VP stints at Roche and Ionis Pharmaceuticals.

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